Update: John Chandler-Pepelnjak notes in the comments to this post that a new entry for a team called "The Thought Gang" just qualified for the "Progress Prize" of $50k. Excellent.

Update: Two weeks after the start of the Netflix contest, there are now six entries that beat Netflix Cinematch. The top entry, "NIPS Reject", has a nearly 2% improvement. Impressive.

Update: Things are heating up. Eighteen days after the start of the contest, there are now thirteen entries that beat Netflix and nine that qualify for the Progress Prize. The top entry has a nearly 5% improvement, halfway to the Grand Prize of $1M.

The problem posed by the Netflix contest is quite a bit different than what I normally do. Most recommender systems do what are called "Top N" recommendations, finding a small group of items that are likely to be of interest to someone. This Netflix contest requires a recommender system that can predict the expected rating of any item including items the customers will hate. That is a very different problem.

I am playing around with the Netflix data -- it is quite a bit of fun -- but I think this contest likely will be won by people with more substantial computing resources than I have available.

Wow.... this is pretty awesome I must say... I have to figure out how they determine the ranking improvement. Certain algorithms can work well under certain scenarios but the problem is the non-trivial edge cases.......

Anyway... pretty sweet. This is turning into the X-prize. Might actually be a model for tech people who aren't entrepreneurs.